Whattya know, even though it’s Fall, I found a bee in my bonnet today.
Actually, I’m writing this post just so I have the ammunition later to say, “I told you so.”
I was thinking about how proponents of Intelligent Design (a.k.a. creationism, a.k.a. religious fiction), like to look down their nose and say, “Nobody has ever shown that you can create LIVING things from non-living chemicals.”
Ignoring that non-living chemicals are required for living things to survive (salt, iron, ascorbic acid to name a few, anyone?), and ignoring that any parent of a teen-aged boy sees life emerge from non-life every morning, all that’s probably going to change soon.
Craig Venter is getting pretty close to building an organism from scratch (I think by following an unpublished Julia Child recipe for flan).
Get that? He’s going to take some non-living chemicals, put them together and, Mary Shelley, This Is Your Life… he’s going to turn ’em into something living.
Okay, now here’s where I predict the future:
The boneheads creationists will use Venter’s accomplishment — the one that debunks their arguments with a 360-degree spinning slam dunk — as proof for their theory.
Can you guess how (gold stars if you do)?
BAAAAP! Time’s up.
It’s simple.
They’ll dust off the “blind watchmaker theory,” give it a new coat of crap-colored paint and say:
See! It took an intelligent designer to create life! We win. Nanny-nanny boo-boo!
May I reserve the space now to, in the future, scream, “Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhh!”
Oh, they may whip out another classic from the anti-rational archives:
Yeah, but he made a little one-celled organism. That doesn’t prove anything.
I’m sure it’ll be lost on anyone who would make that argument that even if there were an Adam and Eve, the guy who was intelligent enough to be the designer of that one-celled organism EVOLVED from them. After all, A&E never brewed up a batch of biologically activity in the garden (thanks to my wife for pointing that one out).
So bookmark this page, once Venter (and, admittedly, the equally brainy bunch he works with and competes against) succeed, we’re in for a bumpy ride as we careen through the intellectual vacuum.